Unpacking Inter-dependent Considerations Associated with Selecting Data for Reuse as Part of the Discovery Process

This presentation reports preliminary findings from an interview study conducted at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). We present insights from 20 semi-structured interviews of secondary data users about data search, reuse, and recommendation. We conducted interviews as part of a larger study for a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project. Academic literature shows varied data discovery practices among scientists are the norm (e.g., Gregory et al., 2020). Our NSF-sponsored work (Lafia et al., 2023; Million et al., in review) confirms this finding, but much less understood is how inter-dependencies among information needs, data types, and user contexts (to name a few factors) create variable data discovery behaviors (and why).

We classify interviews using a structured codebook (Saldaña, 2011) to understand why data discovery at ICPSR is varied. Our interviews related to data discovery behavior from a variety of angles. Our presentation focuses on the search process (i.e., looking for data to meet an information need) and data reuse (i.e., processes after users find relevant data that may lead them to search for additional data or information to complete a study). We show how our interview passages align with search paths we previously identified (Lafia et al., 2023) and that considerations tied to doing research produce variability in data discovery. We conclude data discovery occurs in an ecosystem extending beyond individual data archives and repositories, which further increases variation in discovery behavior.